ABSTRACT
The most pervasive single literary influence in the fiction of toreo has not been French or Spanish, but American, in the person of Ernest Hemingway. Further, "Hemingway's writing on the bulls is good. A more serious flaw is the introduction of Juan Belmonte into the narrative. It is a flaw because the writer's fictional reality, so carefully constructed, is violated rudely by the comparison with historical reality in the person of the historical individual. Between his fiction on toreo and Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway hypnotized virtually every subsequent novelist of toreo. Hemingway's aging novillero, Manuel Garcia of "The Undefeated," is his fullest fictional portrait of a matador. The bulls of fiction prove to be as difficult to dominate as the bulls of fact. Spota's passes are all given on the knees, and all his bulls are resabios. On the surface, Manuel is one of Hemingway's galleries of unthinking noble savages: "He knew all about bulls.
